


Springs Eternal

by mllelaurel



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: 'Holy Shit I'm Not Dead' Sex, Banter, Bickering, Chronic Illness and Its Aftereffects, F/M, Questionable Immortality, Verdant Wind route
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:46:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25786822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mllelaurel/pseuds/mllelaurel
Summary: Claude chases a legend and finds a cure at the eleventh hour. Lysithea battles hope and struggles to adjust.
Relationships: Lysithea von Ordelia/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30
Collections: FE3H Kink Meme





	Springs Eternal

She can barely walk by the time they reach the island. Claude holds her as the crew lowers the rowboat to set them ashore. The captain would wait a week without a signal. After that, they’re on their own. With her head propped on the bench, Lysithea drifts. In and out, in and out, like the rhythm of Claude’s breath. Her own hitches. More than once in the voyage, she’d woken up wheezing, lungs struggling to expel blood-spattered gunk. Once, Claude says, he’d found her not breathing at all. 

No matter. She’s still here. She’d survived the Adrestian occupation of Ordelia. Survived a war and won. She is Lysithea von Ordelia, who’d held the line at Byleth Eisner’s side, the best mage of her generation. No mere illness would claim her. 

Not yet. 

The boat jolts as it hits the sand. She can feel the balance of it shift, as Claude hops out to tether it. _I could have warped us here_ , she thinks. No need to bother with this shitty bundle of planks. The dark magic roils beneath her skin, more potent than ever, oily and bucking her control. The last time she tried casting a spell, a vessel in her nose had burst, gushing blood everywhere. That’s the problem with dark magic. It’s powerful and nearly untamed. Not ‘but’—’ _and_ ’. 

Lysithea had tamed it once. She will bring it to heel again, given only the time. 

Time. Goddess. She didn’t think she had any left. Damn Claude for filling her ears with hope when it was the thing she could least afford. She could have been home right now, in her own bedroom, the scents of her parents’ bakery filtering through the windows. Her father had nearly perfected his new boule when Claude and Lysithea had left to chase wild geese. 

And yet being with Claude makes her believe there is merit to his crazy scheme. He’s a dreamer with a knack for weaving dreams into reality. A master tactician, a long-lost prince, what are the chances? An idiot man who threw open his treasury and all but threw away his own life for the chance to save her. 

He claims he’d found something, rumors leading him to this lonely island, leagues beyond the Morfis coast. In a better time, Lysithea might have begged to stay in Morfis. Their magical discoveries are unparalleled. She could spend a lifetime studying all their universities had to teach. But a lifetime is subjective in her case, barely worth the tuition fees. 

Claude would have to carry her the rest of the way to their destination. It’s as sweet as it’s humiliating. She rests her head against his chest, archer’s armor imprinting on her cheek, and wishes she had any energy left to argue. 

They camp for the night under a canopy of trees. The grunts and sighs of unfamiliar animals invade Lysithea’s restless dreams. The fire crackles as Claude keeps watch. The beasts keep their distance. 

She wakes to the sound of singing, blood-thumping Almyran chorus, interspersed with a surprisingly gentle melody. Her Almyran isn’t fluent yet, but scattered words tell the story of a warrior’s wife, who stole horses made of fire and rode them to storm the castle where her husband was held prisoner. Lysithea wonders how she’d kept her behind from smouldering. That might have been in the lyrics she couldn’t translate. 

“We’re almost there,” Claude tells her when he sees that her eyes are open. 

***

They arrive at the spring before noon, right as the heat of the day is starting to fall thick around them. Claude sets her down gently on the verdant grass, and Lysithea thinks, _all right. The grass is alive. That’s a good sign for the water not killing us._ “Wait,” she tells Claude. Her voice comes out croaky. It’s better to hold off until they see at least one animal drinking. 

It doesn’t take long. Soon enough, something which looks like a cross between a cat and a deer trots down and lowers its muzzle into the water. Lysithea, Goddess help her, wants to pet it. So bad. By the look on his face, Claude is thinking the same thing.

“Don’t,” she says. _One_ of them needs to have a drop of common sense and restraint about this. 

Claude chuckles. “How well you know me.” 

The deer-cat-thing licks its chops, hisses at the two of them conversationally, and retreats. According to legend, humans never come to this island unless their need is dire. The local animals neither recognize them as prey nor see them as a threat. Might be a nasty surprise for one of them, if Claude has to hunt, but jerky and dried fruit has held them out so far. 

“Looks like we’re good,” Claude says. “Hang in there, okay? You look like you’ve been having a pretty good day so far, right?” It’s true enough. She’s felt more alert all morning than she has in ages. Best not to get cocky, though. How many people claim they feel better right before they die? The pain recedes as the nerves fail. The mind gives up fighting and starts feeding you false bliss. 

“This is it.” Claude fills a flask with the water and tries to give it to her, but Lysithea’s hands shake too much to hold it. In the end, he has to support her as she sits, hold the flask up to her mouth, and wait for her to swallow. 

_This isn’t me_ , Lysithea thinks. _This can’t be me._ Except this _has_ been her, for weeks now, and getting worse. Talking may be easier, but the evidence is clear. She was stronger than this even yesterday. 

“How… How will we know if it worked?” she asks. Maybe it would have been better if she’d left the question unspoken, held on to that ambiguity. But even the worst scholar knows you don’t learn anything without asking. 

Claude shakes his head. “I don’t know. Do you feel better?”

Does she? It’s subtle, if so. Nothing like the warm flow of a faith spell. Then again, faith spells have done nothing for her once she arrived at the eleventh hour. No way forward except to test it. “Let go of me,” she says. “I’m gonna sit on my own.” 

It’s wobbly. _She’s_ wobbly. Lysithea’s head spins and she has to fight off an empty stomach’s nausea. The soft muscles in her core strain and contract. Her perspective shifts as she hauls herself into a sitting position. 

Claude cocks his head, studying her. “I’m not sure if that was a cure or just _you_.” 

This. This is why Lysithea loves the man. He will tease her. He will poke and prod and get under her skin, but he’s never once underestimated her. Never once attributed her successes to her Crests, or luck, or the work of another. He said he respected her even when they were idiot children. 

“I don’t think it’s just me,” Lysithea says. It’s cautious. She’s never been an optimist. But maybe, maybe…

They give it another hour. Claude coaxes her to drink more of the water. She couldn’t taste it before, Lysithea realizes. As time goes on, she notices a faint herbal tang. Like mint or chamomile, mellow and sweet. They soak some of the dried apricots in it, and the fruit almost seems to bloom, expanding faster than should be possible. Claude steals a few, and even though the fruit is totally hers by right, Lysithea lets him have it. 

The apricots are sweet. The realization hits Lysithea like the heaving tremors of a Ragnarok. The fruit has a taste! She’s… It might be a little extreme to say she’s hungry. But she’s getting there. She’s curious about food at least, and that hasn’t been true in forever. 

She remembers the bleak shadow on her mother’s face as she realized the sweet buns from the bakery could no longer tempt her. Even decades later, those Agarthan bastards still found a way to make her hurt her family. They had burned in the end, and it still wasn’t enough to absolve them of their debts. 

Sometimes it scares her, how the years have never cooled her hatred of them. Sometimes she sinks into it like a bath. That anger has propelled her forward. It has kept her alive. She’d be loath to give it up. 

“Stick of jerky for your thoughts?” Claude waves it in front of her face. 

Lysithea wrinkles her nose. “Ewwww. Get that away from me.”

“I bet you’ll want it in another few minutes.” 

“Never,” Lysithea proclaims. “That stuff’s gross.” 

Claude takes a bite of the offending jerky. “Still got the tastes of a little kid, huh?”

Lysithea thinks about elbowing him. But honestly, he’s just dug his own grave. “Oho? Does that mean you asked a little kid to marry you? What will your subjects say, Your Majesty?”

“I’m not…” Claude doesn’t often let her see how weary he feels. A little of it slips through now. Taking the throne of Almyra was an uphill battle for him, even after he’d made his name in Fodlan. Reclaiming it from regency when they return won’t be a walk in the park either. 

“Oh, please,” Lysithea scoffs. In the end, they both know he can do it. She’s seen what he’s capable of, and this is the least of it. 

“Hey,” Claude pats her shoulder. “You’re well enough to argue.”

“I’m always well enough to argue,” Lysithea retorts, for argument’s sake. 

***

She’s on her feet again in a few hours. The speed of her recovery is unmistakable. Claude whoops to see her stand, swinging her around in giddy circles. 

“Don’t kiss me,” she warns him, because she damn well _knows_ him. 

“You gonna barf?” he asks, quickly putting her down. 

“I’m not gonna barf.” That may or may not be a lie, steadying more lie-like as her world settles again. “I’ve just… I’ve been sick and sweaty on a boat for…” She looks away. “How long’s it been?” She knows she’s missing a lot of that time. 

“Two months,” Claude says. “Yeah, no I get it. I’ve been on that boat too.” Salt water will do it a pinch when it comes to scrubbing down, but it leaves a nasty residue. “Hey, I bet there’s a pool we can take a dip in somewhere around here.” 

“You sure _that’s_ not going to do something weird and magical to us too?”

Claude grins. “Not at all. Though I figure if that was the case, it would be somewhere in the legends too. You know, big dire warnings.” He wiggles his fingers. “Take care, yon traveler, not to swim in the River of Despair, or the ghooooosts of the drowned will come and pull you to the depths. Wooooooo.” 

“I’m going to kill you,” Lysithea says, shivering.

“So that I can haunt you? Aww, that’s almost sweet.” 

“I’m going to kill you and have you _exorcised_.” 

There is, in fact, a pool not too far from where they’ve set themselves down. Shucking her travel-worn clothing is a breathtaking relief. They’ve both got extras in their packs, which will come in handy now. Fallen leaves and silty ground squelch beneath her feet as she steps into the water. 

“You okay in there?” Claude asks from the shore, like he’s not dying to dive in himself. 

She rolls her eyes. “I can wash my butt without your help, thanks.” 

Claude waggles his eyebrows. “But what if I want to help you wash your butt?”

“Then suffer unfulfilled.” Lysithea lets herself sink up to her neck. Lets the water start to sluice away the misery of the last several months. ‘Start’ being the key word. The less she thinks on the current condition of her body, the better for her mind and sanity. 

This is why Claude has given her that little bit of distance. She needs to know she can do this basic, stupid washing thing without his help. She also needs to assess whether the illness has left her too hideous to let him near her. 

“Hey.” Claude splashes down into the water next to her, and Lysithea nearly jumps out of her skin. 

“Don’t you… Gyah! Sneaking up on me like that. I could have Miasma-ed you in the _face_!”

He holds up his hands in mock-surrender. “No, not the face. Anything but that.”

She shrugs. “Whatever. You’d look roguish with a scar. Almyrans would think you’re a badass. Everybody wins.”

“I’ll take it under advisement.” Claude wraps his arms around her. You couldn’t pay her enough to figure out how he’s managed to strip naked that fast while she wasn’t looking, but damn it, he managed. His chest is warm against her back, primal comfort Lysithea refuses to believe she needs. Her throat tightens, and she fights the urge to bury her face in him and bawl. 

For once in his life, Claude doesn’t say anything annoying. He just holds her and lets her… whatever it is that her leaky face is doing. Somewhere in there, she’s turned around to face him. His hands rub soothing circles on her back. She probably smears snot on him in thanks. They’re never bringing this up again, okay? 

“Definitely don’t kiss me now,” she says, and ducks underwater, letting all vision blur into green. 

Claude kisses her when she comes up again, sputtering and clean. His hands frame her face, tangle in her still-wet hair. 

“Asshole,” she murmurs against his mouth, biting his lip until he lets her in. The warmth of his breath mingling with hers rips something loose inside her, unspools a half-forgotten heat low in her belly. “Goddess, fuck. Why are you so—?”

“Handsome?” Claude suggests. “Stunning? Devilishly charismatic?”

“Full of yourself?” Lysithea digs her fingers into his hair, the only thing on him she can really grab right now. “Who said you could stop kissing me?”

“Uh… You did?”

Technically he’s correct. But he’s a jerk, so his opinion doesn’t count. 

“I want…” The words are too large for their sounds. She _wants_. She wants everything. She wants _him_ , and she’s alive to want anything at all. 

Claude’s eyes are very green and shockingly earnest when he nods. “Y-yeah.” He hoists her up by her thighs, hands skating over her buttocks. She locks her legs behind his waist, loops her arms around his neck, and hangs on. Her thighs tremble from the strain, still weak. 

He steps out of the pool to drop her on the grass, where it grows the softest, and follows her down, kissing her ears, her breasts, the ticklish place right above her belly button which makes her want to kick. Lower, until he finds her pussy, spreading her folds and running his tongue over her entrance to her clit. “Gods, I’ve missed the taste of you.” 

Lysithea’s breaths come in great panting heaves. She feels lightheaded, wound tight as a spring. Claude’s tongue darts inside her, curling and flaring where she opens. She tugs on his hair. “S-slow down.” It used to be she would come again and again, sensitive to the merest touch of his fingers or tongue, each tiny crackle of electricity only building to something larger. She has a sinking feeling a single orgasm would wipe her out this time, leaving her exhausted and dead to the world. 

Ugh. Bad choice of words there. Moving right along.

Claude lets up with a final lick. “Everything okay?”

“I want to ride you,” she tells him. Above him, in complete control, with gravity to help get his dick as deep in her as it will go. Yes, that sounds right. 

Claude rolls obligingly onto his back. “Think you’re wet enough to take me?”

Lysithea frowns. “I think so?” She definitely feels hot enough, turned-on enough, but that’s not quite the same, is it? Dipping her fingers between her legs only gets her the same ambiguous answer. “It should be fine if I take it slow.” Especially if he’s playing with her clit while she does it. 

She braces herself on his chest, brackets his thighs with hers, a wider stretch for her hips than she remembers. She can feel the tip of his dick behind her, hot and velvety. All she has to do is scoot back, and...

Her thigh spasms, and she curses, tears of rage and frustration prickling behind her eyelids. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” That’s what she gets for being out of practice. “I fucking hate everything.” And fuck, it’s not even that important on the scale of everything else, but it’s just another reminder of all the ways in which her body has failed her as it cruised to the deadline. 

Claude gathers her up, rolls them both onto their sides. “Give it until tomorrow?” he says, and she is so fiercely, pathetically grateful he doesn’t try to feed her some platitudes about how this is okay, or this is good enough. Tomorrow’s fine. Tomorrow will do, and facts are facts. She’s healing, and _fast_ , but even magic needs a little time. 

“Thanks,” she whispers, only loud enough for him to hear. He digs his knuckles into the meat of her thigh, until the muscles release, and she nearly whimpers in relief. “You’re…” ‘Amazing,’ she wants to say. ‘Perfect, brilliant, kind.’ None of the words seem right, and all of them do. 

“Should we?” Claude gestures vaguely to the two of them.

Lysithea shakes her head. “I want to keep going.”

Claude bends his head to nuzzle at her breasts. “Yeah, I think we can do that.” He’d sound almost serious if he didn’t punctuate it with a nipple in his mouth.

“On my back again,” Lysithea decides. It would actually probably work. It’s a position she likes well enough. It still feels like a concession. 

He spends what feels like ages between her legs, teasing her with his mouth, working one agile finger inside her after another. Until the sourness passes and the moment is all there is. Until she’s clutching his hair and tugging him upwards. Until she can taste herself on his tongue and balance an ankle on the jut of his hip. 

The sun flares too bright as he eases inside her. She turns her head, bites her lip, squeezes her eyes shut, but there’s no escaping the intensity, the way her heart swells and thumps in her chest. Claude holds very still, breathing fast, and doesn’t move until she squeezes his hand in reassurance.

His hair’s still dripping from the pool, droplets on her face, but the water is warm, and that can’t be right. She forces her eyes open again. Tears streak his face, haloed by the golden glow, trailing from the tip of his nose to splash onto hers.

“Claude, are you—?” 

He flashes her a shaky smile through the mess. “Pfff, I’m fine. Happy, adrenaline, all that junk. See?”

She pokes him in the face. “Wuss.” 

“What was that for?” He grinds deeper into her in retaliation, making her gasp and shudder as his dick rubs against a particularly sensitive spot. “Not like you didn’t do it first.” 

“Yeah, but that was different,” she grumbles. 

“Oh?” He drawls. “And how does that work?” 

Replying would be a lot easier if he didn’t follow up by biting the top of her breast, sucking a mark onto it. Lysithea opens her mouth, and all that comes out is a high-pitched cry. 

Claude smirks. “That’s what I thought.” He lifts one of her legs over his shoulder and drops a hand to her clit, tiny, flicking circles, just the way she likes. She’d preferred to do it herself when they were just starting, rubbing one out while he fucked her, hard and fast. Until he managed to pin her wrists to the bed, find the perfect rhythm, and make her come screaming. 

He _knows_ her, knows this body as well as his own, and somewhere in there, Lysithea had realized that she trusts him to learn her, again and again. 

“I love you,” she tells him, and it’s not embarrassing. It’s not too much, even if she’s said it before, even if he knows already. The words feel right, blooming and falling like roses from her lips. 

Claude leans his forehead against hers. “You’re back,” he whispers.

“I was never gone.”

“You...” He swallows. “You might have. You almost did.” 

“I know.” She pulls herself up to kiss him. “I’m not going anywhere. I promise.” 

His fingers on her clit speed up, and he swallows her moans, fucking her slow and relentless until it overwhelms her. Lysithea comes with the lush grass beneath her back, the azure sky wheeling above her, and Claude pressed deep, deep inside her, gasping and shaking apart in her arms. 

***

“You know,” she says in the afterglow, “I’ve heard the legends too.” Claude looks up from where his head is pillowed on her chest. “The way the sailors talk, it sounds like the water’s as likely to turn you immortal as it is to cure you.” 

“That’s the trouble with legends,” Claude says, deliberately casual. “But just in case…” He fiddles with a long strand of her hair. “I made sure I wouldn’t stick you with it alone.” 

Lysithea’s heart skips a beat. “The apricots…” He’d soaked them in the water from the spring. Would that be enough? Had he drunk some as well? 

“Got it in one!” Claude props himself up onto his elbows. “Come on, it’ll be great. Imagine it for just one moment, think how _huge_ this world is, how little of it we know. To have all the time we could possibly want to explore it, to have someone to do it with… I never dreamed such a thing would be possible until now.”

“And if we get sick of each other?” Lysithea asks. 

“Then we take a break from each other’s company for a while. Like sensible people.”

“ _I’m_ a sensible person,” Lysithea says. 

Claude makes a rude noise. “I love you with all my heart, but you are so fucking not.”

“That’s what you think.” Not her best retort. Not by a mile. She’ll have to work on that. 

“And after the break,” Claude continues, “we find each other again. We always will, I promise. And even if we move on, even if we fall out of love, that’s still not losing each other, is it?”

“Of course not,” she agrees for a change. “You’ve been my friend from the start.” Her best friend, one of the few she’d allowed anywhere close to her prickly soul. 

...Oh. “We’ll outlive everyone else,” she realizes.

Claude turns away. “After the war… This is already more time than we might have gotten with them.” So many hadn’t made it. Lysithea refuses to think of Edelgard, who’d been so kind to her. Whose lilac eyes had nearly seen right through Lysithea’s every facade, and in whose name Lysithea had grimly watched while the Agarthan city smouldered. _There’s a world_ , Lysithea thinks, _where I might have joined her_. And then where would they have been? 

“You’re right,” she says. “Don’t make me say it again.”

“Hah! Like I can make you do anything you don’t want.” 

“You like me that way,” she says. 

“I do,” he replies, taking her hand in both of his. “Which is why I’m going to ask again. Lysithea, will you marry me?”

“What kind of question is that?”

He actually looks kind of hurt. Occasionally Lysithea forgets even Claude’s got those soft, frayed spots for her jagged edges to scrape across. Jokester, king, adventurer, visionary. Still he’s not invulnerable. “I meant, of course I would marry you!” she blurts out. “I just said I’d try eternity with you, didn’t I?”

He squeezes her a little too tight. “Heh. Thought you might say that.” 

“No you didn’t.” 

Lysithea flicks him on the forehead, then kisses the spot. He smells like grass and salt and sun-warmed skin, and her heart aches with it. “You keep telling yourself that,” she says. 

“What now?” he asks. 

Lysithea props her chin on his chest. “What do you think, Khalid?” She’s still getting used to his other name, Almyran syllables clumsy on her tongue. But it’s his, and the light in his eyes when she says it is a sight to behold. 

Maybe they have centuries ahead of them. Maybe just a lifetime—except there’s no ‘just’ about it, is there? The thought of ordinary years is almost too huge to comprehend. Claude has given her that. Giving back what she has taken from him is the least she can do. 

“Let’s go visit my parents,” she says. “And then let’s go take back your kingdom.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the following FE3H Kink Meme Prompt:
>
>> Lysithea/Claude, post-ending, glad-you're-alive sex.
>> 
>> She's cured but he just wants to make sure...by fucking both of their brains out.
>> 
>> Bonus points for Claude uncharacteristically getting emotional/vulnerable and crying.


End file.
